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Updated Key government services were taken offline over the weekend after the discovery in a pub car park of a pocket storage device containing details of the Government Gateway. The Gateway is intended to provide a central secure login service for a range of government systems, including tax credits and self assessment, so taking it offline paralyses these too, before you can say 'single point of failure'.

The device, which was passed to the Mail on Sunday last week, was lost two weeks ago outside a pub in Cannock, Staffordshire, by an employee of Atos Origin. In 2006 Atos Origin won a £46.7m five-year contract to provide managed IT services for the Government Gateway.

The Department of Work & Pensions claims that the data on the device was encrypted and the security of the Government Gateway had not been breached. However, according to the Mail, Jacques Erasmus, a security expert who examined the device for the paper, said it contained passwords, security software and "source code". Erasmus told the paper: "I could decrypt those passwords to log in to the system and roam around the network. As we can see from the data on the USB stick, the systems contain highly sensitive personal information. If you can crack those encrypted passwords, and it would just be a matter of time, you could potentially access those 12 million accounts and those details."

In a statement Atos Origin said that the removal of the device from its premises was in direct breach of its operating principles, while the DWP said that an "urgent investigation" was under way.

By lunchtime, the Information Commissioner had weighed in, with a statement informing us Richard Thomas "is now awaiting the results of ongoing investigations to establish the facts and the nature and extent of any risk to individuals."

The statement added, "The Information Commissioner expects the Government to take appropriate damage limitation steps as its first priority."

A year after the MHMRC data debacle, this sounds hopeful, at best.

Meanwhile, in an entirely unrelated piece of joined-up data loss, DWP Secretary James Purnell has been spotted shedding confidential documents on a train. ®